Duke 72, Kentucky 77 Post Game Thread

dyedwab said:
Three takeaways, and they are mostly about us, not about the team

1) It's the third game of the season and the negativity in the game chat and in here is unbelievable. I know I have contributed my share over the years and I pledge to be better. But, for pete's sake, IT'S THE THIRD GAME OF THE SEASON.

2) Going into tonight, we clearly had a solid 8 man rotation. Sion gets hurt, Maluach get cramps, and people are griping at Scheyer for not putting Evans and Harris. I mean, come on. When have we had solid 8-man rotation established this early in the season. Ever.

3) Jay Bilas is a member in good standing of The Brotherhood and has done a lot for the program. I also can not ever listen to him announce a Duke game ever again.
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Agree on point 3. Bilas is the most self-righteous, pompous, wanna-be ref, when he calls games. I’ll take Cory Alexander 100x over Bilas.
 
BigZ said:
Need more offensive options. Foster and Procter need to be focus of the offense more
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Proctor and Foster historically disappeared in tough games and at key points in most games. I didn’t see anything different from them tonight. I would look to Sion to start and increase Gillis’s minutes. We needed leadership and toughness from our only 2 returners tonight and they basically no showed. Proctor did hit a few shots early but was MIA the last 30 minutes.
 
Whats with the Kon favortism by the way!? Evans didn't even play a single minute?

It he really that far behind during practice? Looks great everytime he comes on in the limited minutes he gets during games. I swear he could have done a better defensive job than Kon. Also has better length and is just as good a scorer imo.

I think Coach Scheyer really needs to take a long hard look at that rotation. Theres no way Kon should be playing 37 minutes, especially the way he performed in the second half.
 
SkyBrickey said:
We had a HORRIFIC night shooting. Still almost won the game. We will be fine.
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We will probably find out later that most of the team was sick or something. They just didn’t have the same verve they had in the exhibition games and first couple of regular season games.
 
A lot of the poor shooting has to do with poor offensive execution for sure. I don't understand why we didn't run the offense late in the game. Sure, we have the best player in the country, but why put that on him? We have so much talent on this team and other good options that we should just run offense and find the best shot. Credit to UK for stout defense in the second half as well.
 
We are a young team. When our older guys get their footing we are going to be very hard to beat. I think this team has a late Zoubek emerge down the stretch.

Agree 100% about Bilas. His games are like Billy Packer games back in the day. You just have to mute and see the game play out. Every officiating comment or missed call is for our opponents.
 
Dr. Maturin said:
Eh. Better team lost. If not for some absolutely wild 3 point shooting variance, we win fairly easily. Also we lost 2 guys to injury and had some bad bounces on out of bounds plays. Credit to UK for making plays late, but if we play like this all year we'll win a lot of games.

That's not to say there aren't concerns. I thought we were great for about 25-30 minutes, but poor down the stretch. We got rattled, and Jon didn't have the answer. It didn't quite feel like the elite eight game, but somewhat similar. I think Jon may have pushed Kon too hard, and he was clearly gassed. Leaving Maluach to mark Carr when they went small was a mistake. We didn't have a great plan for the last two possessions. If we were just going to run Cooper ISO, why bit hold it to the end of the shot clock?

Our freshmen sure looked like freshmen late. Kon inexplicably didn't call time out, leading to a bad turnover (he also did this in the 1st half but got away with it). Cooper had 3 TOs late and the failed block out. Good learning experiences for our guys.
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Disagree. Carr was taking advantage of Maluach. Brown came in and gave us some good minutes.
 
Dukehk said:
Whats with the Kon favortism by the way!? Evans didn't even play a single minute?

It he really that far behind during practice? Looks great everytime he comes on in the limited minutes he gets during games. I swear he could have done a better defensive job than Kon. Also has better length and is just as good a scorer imo.

I think Coach Scheyer really needs to take a long hard look at that rotation. Theres no way Kon should be playing 37 minutes, especially the way he performed in the second half.
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Evans is way behind Kon. But this is the Duke way. I'd you win the job, you play 35+ in big games. There really isn't a developing process for guys that don't crack the top 8. Us fans just hope they come back for year 2.
 
Missing players, missing shots, missing defensive assignments, missing foul calls. It's amazing that Duke didn't get blown out. Duke did not handle the last 4 minutes well and that is on Jon.

My concerns about Duke's defense remain. Two poor defenders in the starting five is tough to overcome when the shots aren't falling.
 
UK is going to have a good season. They are very quick and athletic. Duke is going to have a good season too, potentially great, but we really need to shoot better from 3 and to toughen up in crunch time. Foster, Proctor, and Kneuppel all looked good in the first half but disappeared in the 2nd. They are too important to not be factors late in the game. Coop can't be all on his own.
 
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DBKilby said:
Evans is way behind Kon. But this is the Duke way. I'd you win the job, you play 35+ in big games. There really isn't a developing process for guys that don't crack the top 8. Us fans just hope they come back for year 2.
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Sad but true. Wish they gave the 9th and 10th guys some minutes besides 5 min during a 40-50 point blowout. How else will they develop? We may need them down the stretch— could have used their shooting tonight!!!
 
I felt that we lost this game more than Kentucky won it.

It's great to play through Cooper, but jeez, he's bringing the ball up at the end. Maybe that's why he made two boneheaded turnovers and missed a box out in the last 90 seconds... because he spent his energy elsewhere?

Kon will be fine... I think. But the quicker teams are gonna be tough for him to get his shot off against, at first. He probably has not seen a team as quick as Kentucky before.

The defense was great but I was a little worried when Jon was so pleased at the halftime interview. Not b/c he shouldn't be pleased, but b/c Jon seems to make better halftime adjustments than in game adjustments, so I was worried when I knew we didn't have much to adjust, while Kentucky certainly would.

I think it's emotionally distressing, and it's a fact that it's physically distressing, when two of your top eight get injured. Man-man didn't look right immediately after he went down the first time. He stopped skying for blocks on defense and just sort of started taking up space, which is effective, but way below his ceiling.

You could feel Kentucky take the momentum with 10 minutes left. I would have liked to have seen us answer a little better, but we're inexperienced as a team. The potential is still there. Maybe a loss will kick us in the pants a little. I didn't think we got physically knocked back, as in previous years. This felt like a winnable game with our players not aligned in mental toughness.
 
DBKilby said:
Evans is way behind Kon. But this is the Duke way. I'd you win the job, you play 35+ in big games. There really isn't a developing process for guys that don't crack the top 8. Us fans just hope they come back for year 2.
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Jon is clearly a bright guy. I honestly expected him to think for himself more, not just copy K. That's all he knows I suppose. Might have been helpful for him to start off someplace fresh and really learn what works best.
 
One other thing I'll point out (and then off to bed) for those expecting us to learn and get better as a group, we will. But so will everyone else. Basically every team is a brand new group learning and growing together. We may well have more runway than others given our freshmen but it's not like the old days when we had largely freshmen and everyone else had largely returning squads.

I don't mean to be a debbie downer. I truly believe this game can and probably will benefit us (and maybe Cooper most of all who probably has faced minimal adversity to this point in his basketball career). But the same old talking points we're used to don't carry as much truth as they used to.

Next play. Good night, all.

- Chillin
 
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